OldSchool!!! (Tom Karnik)

I am going to talk about a TV with an antana and a VCR. Those were popoular when I was a child but now I am 16 years old and we have updated both of those things. Instead of having an antana on your televisions we now have no antanas and they are also much thinner. We have upgraded the the VCR to a DVD Player. The DVD Player has much better quality than the VCR. The DVD's for the DVD Player are much smaller than a VCR Tape.

Portable CD Players... Outdated?

Portable CD Players:
One thing that I think is outdated nowadays is the portable CD player. They were ran off batteries and you had to carry around tons of discs with them. They were a very strange size (big and skinny) and could not fit in your pocket. When you we listening to them in a vehicle, they would skip. Vehicle CD players are still in use because you can hold CDs in your car easier than you can haul them around in your backpack. I think that the MP3 player replaced the portable CD player, but I think that the MP3 player was short lived and was replaced by the Multimedia players like Ipods and Zunes. Ipods and Zunes are favored because they can hold up to as much as 2400 CDs on them as well as they are very sleek and they do more than play music.

5 things that are already obsolete for you!

The Huffington post wrote an article predicting  things that will become obsolete this year. You’re Out: 20 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade (with photos)!  There is also a great list of other items on the MoneyTalksNews blog titled 30 things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know.

As I was looking through the pictures and reading about what they are predicting will become obsolete, I was thinking about my own life and what already is obsolete in my world. Here is my ‘hit list’ of things I will no longer have to deal with:

• Video Tapes – I don’t own a vhs player. None at my house and there isn’t one in my classroom. If I wanted to show an old movie, I would just pull up Netflix and stream it.
• Separation between Personal Life and Work Life – I have email on my phone and ipad. I see work emails at home and personal emails at work. I deal with both in either place. I get a lot of work done between 9:00 pm - 10:00 pm and 5:30am-6:30 am. That is when I have quite time at home and can work with little interruption. If blending some of my personal life over into work is a problem, my productivity at home (working) will probably be nipped short because I will be forced to take time off to deal during work hours with items in my personal life that need attention or will take that quite productive time and turn it into personal time. More and more this is an issue and kids today will have to learn how to walk this fine balancing act in their careers and personal lives.
• Forgetting – I recently got an invite to a beta site called MemoLane. I was playing around with it and wow.. talk about interesting. It aggregates your Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Picasa, and many other sites into a timeline. I went back to the beginning of the time line which took me back to 2003 and displayed some of YouTube videos I have watched and incorporated in my class at that time. This is a screen capture of Feb 9th and 10th and shows a video I uploaded for a personal blog, an image I uploaded for my class’s 33 Day Photo Challenge and 2 Facebook status updates for my Senior Class’s trip we are planning.

It reminds me of the movie with Robin William’s  called Final Cut. He edits people’s lives.

• Watches – I haven’t worn a watch for several years now. I don’t need one unless I am going to Jury Duty which forces you to leave your cell phone in the car via a body search.
• Paper Maps – I was cleaning out my vehicle the other day and remember debating if I should keep a paper map of Denver, Co. I opted to throw it out. My choice was based on the fact I now have GPS Navigation on my iPad with an app from GPS Drive by MotionX along with my gps location on my Blackberry. If my husband needs to travel someplace, I can just loan him my iPad (with written instructions and a threat of course).

There are so many others in the list that I could write a ton about, but I would like to see what you have in your life that has become obsolete and replaced with technology.

A Challenge: please write a comment leaving a similar description of the items you found obsolete in your life and what you replaced them with. If not a comment, then please write a blog post of your own and comment back here with a link so I can read it.

(reposted for a Web Design Class Assignment from Peetz Tech Chatter)

New website ‘sketch’

We are starting on a new website for Sterling High School Track. Here is our sketch created in Bubbl.us

The website progress can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/sterlingtrack/

User feedback

Our web design class has created a website for a client using Google Sites. We have talked with people face to face and are moving to twitter and blogging to gather feedback from others on the site. We are looking for any feedback and especially regarding how easy it is to navigate and user friendly it is.  Please view the website at https://sites.google.com/site/runningofthewieners/ and comment here on this post with feedback for us if you would.

Thanks!
Peetz Web Design Class

Skype pt 3 by Austin Crane

We asked Taylor some questions about the songs and beats he has created. Taylor has made six songs, and over two hundred remixes.  I had the second set of questions to ask Taylor and I started off by asking “Have you had any live performances?” He replied,” not really”.  Taylor explained to us that his hardest song to produce was “Nicki Manaj.” He got his inspiration from a very popular rap artist named Lil Wayne. He doesn’t sell all of his songs because he wants others to get a preview of his music before they buy. He made it clear that as a future artist you must have patience and a lot of time. We all look forward to hearing more of T-Bizzle and B-Teezy in the future.

Skype pt 2 by Jeff Koester

On Friday, December 10th, my web design class asked Taylor Bickford some questions about his rapping career. Taylor thinks that studing copyright infringments is a very important skill so that you can stay out of legal trouble. Marcus and Taylor write their lyrics freestyle, but it takes them a couple hours. Taylor says he likes to include explicit and clean versions of the songs to connect with a variety of all people. He wants to get a studio when he's older, but rapping is just for fun now. Taylor suggests that future rappers need to have time and patience. (and Audacity.)